IdeaFestival

Truth in design

Lately, I've been wondering how design communicates. Adrian Hanft at Be a Design Group rhetorically asks if bad design is good design. Linking to several posts that hint at a bottom line insurrection against design, he argues that good work isn't simply a bias for pretty things, it, rather, makes something clear.

One link, the Design Observer post on The Tyranny of Good Design, appealed indirectly to me by building on the idea of clarity. It had this take on the design of the Google logo.

I began to think about the Google logo (having previously, and with a good deal of superiority, dismissed it as hopelessly amateur) when I noticed clients mentioning it, and telling me how much they liked its frequent graphic makeovers. These comments usually came from hard-nosed business people who’d no sooner allow their own logos to be messed around with, than turn up at a board meeting wearing only a loincloth. Something about Google’s playfulness was getting through to these sober business types.   

Offering his thoughts below the Tyranny post, Gary Boodhoo steered me to Prof. John Maeda's Simplicity blog (there's a theme I can rally around!), which compares the evolution of the Yahoo! and the Google logos. Looking at the comparison, I was at first focused on the actual logos until I realized that what made the Google logo effective wasn't the color, typeface, proportionality, spacing - any of what might be called artful engineering. It was the fact that stacked against the increasingly cluttered Yahoo! home page, the Google page has remained refreshingly spare. The Google logo stood out more, which made the frequent makeovers that much more effective.

And since we're about ideas here, it led me to this thought. Like the beauty of profound equations, simple design is economical, and expressing in its way, something true. It's the opposite of what Jessica Helfand calls thornament, a design tendency toward the needlessly complex.

Wayne

Technorati: design, design thinking, creativity

Media ownership and the idea economy

Having just published yesterday's social media and education post, I read that Ethan Zuckerman was preparing for a speaking engagement with the Open Society Institute. His slide deck - thanks Ethan! - is a comprehensive look at the most common applications and tools for DIY information managment, which he hopes will improve the organization's research and advocacy.

If I may paraphrase: He makes the case that knowledge management has moved down the hall and into your office.

You are the IT Department.

No, no, that's a good thing.

Related, Tom Peters, who appears in CNN.com's World Business section today, points out that the idea economy is powered by individuals.

'The only way we're going to survive is to innovate our way out of the box,' he told a recent conference audience. 'We're down to one idea, which is innovation.'

Peters says 90 percent of all existing white-collar jobs will either disappear or be reconfigured 'beyond recognition' within the next 10-15 years.

A little later,

...It's this free flow of ideas and human capital that will underpin much of the economic growth of the next 50 years.

According to Peters, sitting at the very heart of this tumultuous change is the individual. Only by encouraging original thought and 'nurturing the freaks' will companies have the skills and drive needed to grow.

You know that innovation is terribly important. But here's the exciting part: innovators, the freaks, also own the media. And a big chunk of the future.

Wayne

Why surprise?

I couldn't resist this bit of unusual research, originally from Nature.

Draw your own conclusions. 

Wayne

Reason + imagination = education

David Weinberger participated on a panel at the just concluded Milken Global Conference 2006 on the subject of social media and education. Live blogging while the other panelists spoke, he wrote:   

George Siemens explains his term "connectivism." The half-life of knowledge is diminishing, he says: it's becoming obsolete faster than ever. Courses can't keep up. Connectivism says that the knowledge resides in the networks we create. Our education system was designed to create certainty.

Doug Thomas, who has an article with John Seely Brown in Wired this month, says he's concerned that we're training kids for the best jobs in the 20th Century. Instead, we should be helping expand imagination. He knows a student who has to sneak art and music into his studies because they're not on the test. "Our mission is to try to re-integrate imagination back into the curriculum."

Via monkeymagic, which pointed me in this direction, Weinberger also listed some ideas prior to the conference that he might bring up. Two that caught my eye were "knowledge is a social product, or at least heavily socially contextualized," and  "Knowing has been primarily a way of seeing the simplicity behind the world's apparent complexity," which Piers Young blogs as "simplicity is hard."

That knowledge might be a social product interests me a great deal given my skepticism that consciousness - our knowing of ourselves and the experience of others - is simply the result of brain activity. We demonstrably conceive from the top down as well as the bottom up, and, as Weinberger blogged, can pierce complexity to deduce something basic. We "complexify" things (read the Weinberger and Young posts) because we misapprehend knowing as something received solely from the data, which is now everywhere, a rising crap tide of factoids. Yes, we must have data, but "re-integrating imagination" will in the decades that follow be viewed, along with the long-privileged knowing faculty of reason, as partners in education. One without the other leads, simply, to confusion.

Wayne

Homaro Cantu imagines food in dimensions

Fast Company is out with its first ever food issue. If, as the editor writes, "food is information," what's encoded there?

Dimensional thinking, apparently.

What if dessert looks like a scrap of paper? What if it tastes delicious? And what's up with levitating food? And all the liquid nitrogen?

Meet Homaro Cantu. He imagines food differently.

Wayne

Mapping science method

Maps of science themes and paradigms are currently on display at the New York Public Library as part of the "Places & Spaces: Mapping Science" exhibition, from April 3rd - August 31st, 2006.

Wayne

Design thinking and problem solving

By way of yesterday's post in Functioning Form, I found Luke Wroblewski's 2005 piece A Difference of Design that takes a run at what makes "design thinking" different from the typical business approach to innovation. For example, he describes the problem solving approach between business and design as "definitive" (articulated proofs) v. "iterative" (modeling), respectively, which begins to answer the question I had about how design communicates. Iterative problem solving, happily, also corresponds to my preferred work method, "licorice on the saw."

He goes into more detail in the podcast Design by Design, which I have not yet listened to.

Related, this BusinessWeek article (hat tip: Metacool) has examples of design-powered innovation. The magazine piece

[starts] by looking at the cutting edges, the places where a classic design discipline -- say branding, architecture, or product design -- seemed to blur with something else. It is at the nexus of disciplines that the most exciting new developments tend to emerge.

Through example, it demonstrates how design is being used to tackle a range of problems from "saving us from our data," to doing digital manufacturing (MIT's phrase 'its from bits' sticks in my head), to creating buildings that breathe.

Wayne

Technorati: innovation, design, design thinking, architecture, computer science

Polkinghorne: beauty and belief

For those of you interested in the science - theology dialog, American Public Media's Speaking of Faith has provided audio from an interview with Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne, honored particle physicist and Anglican priest, who was also awarded the Templeton Prize for Science and Religion in 2002.

Current Templeton Prize winner and Cambridge physicist John Barrow will be speaking at the 2006 ideaFestival in Louisville.

What follows are some things that struck me from the 50+ minute interview with host Krista Tippett.

Truth and beauty - The fundamental laws of nature are mathematically beautiful. "In fact, if you've got some ugly equations, you've almost certainly haven't got it right." Beauty is the key for unlocking the physical properties of the world...

It's very hard to describe any form of beauty. In some sense you have to perceive it.... Mathematical beauty is connected with an elegant and economic expression. Those that can speak the mathematical language might agree more readily on what's beautiful than, say, painters considering a painting.

"Wealth of Networks:" Basis for knowledge?

Yochai Benkler is out with his much anticipated book, "Wealth of Networks," based on the "emergence of sharing and collaboration as modalities of economic production," according to Bruno Giussani at Lunch over IP.

Ever since reading the BusinessWeek article on peer production, "The Power of Us," I've been interested in a better explanation of the mechanisms underlying the phenomenon. If, as the article suggests, the firm and the market have been joined by a third value producing method, it represents a turning point in economic history. BusinessWeek:

Peer production... creates value with neither conventional corporate oversight nor market incentives such as payment. 'The economic role of social behavior is increasing,' he [Benkler] says. 'Things that would normally just dissipate in the air as social gestures become economic products.'

In recent months there has been some push back to the idea, notably the suggestion that these "social gestures" amount to free labor. Whether in fact power is being re-appropriated to a broad swath of people, information is more widely available than ever before, and in its understanding, value.

Work on the nature of information is also occurring in law - how is creative value fairly apportioned - and philosophy. In fact, a philosophy of information now supposes something like an atomistic basis for knowledge, which is much different from the historic understanding knowledge as justified + true + belief. If so, the study of information is foundational to the arts and sciences in a couple of ways. Knowledge can be usefully appropriated in community without being fully articulated, or soar majestically as language in Shakespeare's King Henry IV. More on that later.

The Wealth of Networks is, appropriately enough, available in whole or part for download under a creative commons license. Thanks, Bruno, for the pointer.

Wayne

Technorati: Wealth of Networks, peer production. Wikipedia: Yochai Benkler

Initial It!

Recently, America OnLine Inc. officially changed its corporate name to AOL. The change, according to the company chairman, "better reflects our extended mission." Although General Electric has not made such a change, it, too, regularly uses the initials GE for the same reason.

Corporate initalization is not a new public relations phenomenon. As early as the 1930s, radio broadcasting companies identified themselves as CBS and NBC. In the same era the Franklin Roosevelt Administration created its "alphabet agencies," like NRA, WPA and PWA. Moreover, the United States was then widely known as USA and Great Britain simply became UK (for United Kingdom).

Like the signet ring, an old jewelry affectation, the identifying initials of a corporation or even a state (need I add the ill-fated USSR?) became a distinguishing mark, a form of almost mystical identification. The letters FDR form the halo of initials shimmering over the head of one of our most influential presidents, as in a lesser way do the letters JFK. (W will have no lasting presidential significance and, after the Bush Administration slips into history, the letter will revert to its more common placement on a door: W.C.)

Not incidentally, initialization has also become a subdivision of the acronym, as words like NATO and FEMA have entered our vocabulary.

We all talk more and say less, and less well, the contemporary state of speech. Whether the rage of initialization is a reflection of our noisy, but sound bite times is a matter of conjecture. Whatever, it is an interesting development, and one that has bounded forward over the Internet.

Ray Betts